Increasing degrees of force applied to joints result in joint injury. Abnormal joint anatomy is frequently a hallmark of ageing, but joint injury is also frequently seen as a result of trauma. For instance, chondral lesions are often seen in athletes. While joint injury resulting from trauma is typically associated with acute inflammation, aberrant joint anatomy resulting from ageing (e.g., osteoarthritis) is a chronic condition. Physicians currently do not have a system or method available to differentiate between acute injury due to trauma and age related joint deteriorations. It is presently difficult to determine the appropriate course of treatment for a given patient since it is frequently unclear whether the particular condition the patient suffers from is acute or chronic.
The exceedingly high rate of exploratory knee arthroscopy highlights the difficulty of diagnosing meniscal injury. This problem is exacerbated by the low specificity of MRI, currently a mainstay of diagnosing this pathology. It has been shown that MRI will identify a meniscal injury in as many as 65% of asymptomatic people making MRI a questionable diagnostic tool and highlighting the lack of correlation between abnormal meniscal anatomy and knee pain. Lack of a clear correlation between abnormal meniscus anatomy and knee pain is particularly problematic in the elderly patient population many of whom develop osteoarthritis. Despite the overwhelming evidence questioning its utility (Moseley et al. 2002), knee arthroscopy is still performed an estimated 660,000 times per year in the U.S. alone (AAOS website).
There is clearly a need for providing a method of identifying patients who have sustained acute joint injury in order to provide them with the appropriate treatment. This invention addresses that need.